* * * * *
                                        
                            Beware the Ides of April
                                        
> Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news,
> Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000
> per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich—the top 1/100th of
> 1 percent of Americans.
> 
> One 1985 law, promoted in the Senate as relieving middle class Americans,
> gave a huge tax break to corporate executives who make personal use of
> company jets. CEO (Chief Executive Officer)s may now fly to vacations or
> Saturday golf outings in luxury for a penny a mile. Congress shifted the
> real cost of about $6 per mile to shareholders, who pay two-thirds, and to
> taxpayers who suffer the rest of the cost lost as a result of reduced
> corporate income taxes.
> 

Via Ceejbot [1], “Stroke the rich—IRS (Internal Revenue Service) has become a
subsidy system for super-wealthy Americans—IRS winks at rich deadbeats [2]”

Something to think about as you are doing your last minute tax preparations.
On the flip side though, about those lear jets:

> This paper studies perquisites of major company CEOs, focusing on personal
> use of company planes. For firms that have disclosed this managerial
> benefit, average shareholder returns under-perform market benchmarks by
> more than 4 percent annually, a severe gap far exceeding the costs of
> resources consumed. Around the date of the initial disclosure, firms' stock
> prices drop by an average of 2 percent. Regression analysis finds negative
> associations between CEOs' personal aircraft use and their compensation and
> percentage ownership, in accord with Jensen-Meckling (1976) and Fama
> (1980), but both relations have small magnitude.
> 

Via Jason Kottke [3], “Flights of Fancy: Corporate Jets, CEO Perquisites, and
Inferior Shareholder Returns [4]”

I wonder if we'll be seeing a rise in civil court actions by shareholders?
Again, something to think about as you fill out your 2003 Form 1040 [5] …

[1] http://www.ceejbot.com/blog/comments/2004-04-12
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
[3] http://www.kottke.org/remainder/04/04/5365.html
[4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=529822
[5] http://www.irs.gov/app/scripts/redirectPDF.jsp?dest=/pub/irs-

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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